


Coda (Until You're Resting Here With Me): Home Is Where

by nyxocity



Series: Until You're Resting Here With Me Verse [2]
Category: Quantum Leap, Supernatural RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Epic Friendship, Gen, SORT OF Al the Bartender - it's an AU go with it, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-12 23:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21234284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyxocity/pseuds/nyxocity
Summary: It takes several years, but they finally do it. This is the story of how.





	Coda (Until You're Resting Here With Me): Home Is Where

From space and time he begins to coalesce, bright blue light flashing almost white as atoms form, nerve endings stretching the length of bone and muscle as they tingle, becoming solid. Skin climbs across his frame, falling into place last, and he lifts his hand, fingers flexing against sunlight. Between them, the sky is brilliant blue, thick white clouds illuminated by golden light and tinted dark gray at the edges, the rare way it only looks just after a thunderstorm. He’s seen it in paintings many times before, but he’s only glimpsed the reality with his eyes once, maybe twice that he can remember.

Remember...

Where is he? Who is he? 

Why is he here?

If leaping has taught him anything, it’s to assess a situation--to discern all the variables. To do the best he can to blend in and pass as the person he’s currently replaced.

He lowers his hand, fingers falling against his thigh, and turns. All around him is an open field of tall, grassy green, slender blades heavy with rainwater, glittering with golden light. The horizon is empty, the world stretching out in rippling waves of green in every direction, sun shining across him from an angle that says it’s about four o’clock. Water hangs in the air around him, caressing his skin, and the ground is cool, mist rising up and swirling, licking at his calves.

It’s late summer, practically fall--he knows that intrinsically somehow. It’s late summer in the midwest; he knows that, too. He also knows that he is alone. Utterly and completely alone.

He can’t remember the last time he made a leap and ended up in a place where he was alone.

He can’t remember the last time he leaped.

He can’t remember...

The fact that he can’t remember scares him almost as much as the fact that he’s alone, although he isn’t sure why either of those things scare him as much as they do. Terror sings through his veins, down his newly formed nerves, sinking deep into his bones.

No. He steadies himself and takes a breath, chest swelling before he exhales. 

This is silly, he thinks, shaking his head as he turns.

A tall man with dark hair sweeping down across his forehead stands before him. He can see the grass through the man, the man’s image popping and stuttering. Hazel eyes stare into his, intense and sincere, and he has a moment to realize the man is impossibly handsome; tanned and younger, his expression kind and sad. But he can see through him--

He sucks in a breath and staggers backwards, away from the other man. “You’re not real,” he shouts, squeezing his eyes shut.

The ground falls away beneath his feet, knees giving out inside the faded blue jeans that encase them, and he hits the ground hard, both hands held out helplessly before him to ward off the vision of the other man.

“Come home,” the man whispers.

The words strike his heart like an arrow, memory not quite remembered, and he stares at the image of the man, the shield of his hands faltering. He pulls a shaky breath into his lungs.

“You’re not right,” he says, voice low. He doesn’t know how he knows, or what he knows, but he knows.

The man’s hazel eyes flash to the side, and then the man speaks. “Jensen… I...I don’t think I’m doing this right.” 

A moment passes as he tries to puzzle out what the man means.

The man takes a breath, and then focuses his eyes on him again. “You have to come home,” he insists.

Coming home is the only part of the man’s words that make sense, tugging at the center of him, spinning and winding around that part of him that’s never in flux with time, the core of him that travels from leap to leap. The part of him that makes sense; the only part that keeps him sane. But stitched to the edge of that essential part is a name… a name that dances on the tip of his tongue like a whisper between worlds; a name he should know as well as his own, and yet it won’t come to him, any more than his own name will.

He’s a grifter in Philadelphia, a military test flight pilot in Texas, a boxer working for a church miracle, a lawyer defending a man on death row, an astronaut on the Apollo launch, a Chippendale dancer, an ordinary mother fiercely protecting her child. He is all of those things, and none of them.

Who is he?

He should know by now.

“I know,” the man with hazel eyes says. “I know it’s confusing. I know it’s been a long time. But you have to trust me.” The man holds out his hand and his face is both sad and kind. “Please.”

Blades of grass ripple through the man’s image, fingers flickering at the edges, but his expression never wavers. “Please come home,” the man whispers.

His heart pounds in his chest, thunder in his ears like a herd of wild horses, and for a moment he is afraid.

_Home._

Long ago and far away and he doesn’t remember what it means, the space that encompasses ‘home’ a black hole in the jumble of his mind, edges ragged with longing and filled with the empty ache of a forgotten name. Bittersweet promise and it’s been so long, too scared to believe, too confused to understand.

And then the man with hazel eyes speaks another name, and he reaches without hesitation across the wet grass and humid air, across time and space itself.

He feels the dissolve of blue-white light wash over him, the shimmer and tingle of his atoms, another time and place calling to him, filled with resolve, with purpose--and after all this time--with finality.

There is sweetness in the moment that he comes apart, the blend of time sweeping him up and carrying him across the entirety of the world all at once. For an instant, he can feel everything; joy, sadness, pleasure and pain, loss and love, the enormity of the human race and all that it is capable of. 

He has time to think of a name--a single name--and then he is pulled into the timestream, scattered across its flow.

*

Blackness. Nothing. No sense of awareness nor of self, stillness deep as death.

And then…

Slow spiral climbing towards white light, barely sentient but filled with the will to live, scattering of blue embers spinning about the slender tendril. It struggles onward against the current that pulls at it, tugging at it, clinging, and then thrashes like a fish tail as it flashes free. Circling upward faster now, no longer an ‘it’ but a he, becoming solid now, more real, blue light building until until it’s blinding, and he realizes he can see it. Scattered pieces pull together, trapping him neatly until he’s ensconced in flesh, lying on something hard and cold, newly formed lungs shivering with breath.

Hands touch him gently, large and warm, and he blinks, turning over, struggling to see with his newborn eyes.

The man with hazel eyes is there, tall and broad, handsome and kind, dark lashes brimming with tears.

“You’re here,” he whispers, almost reverent. “You’re finally here. We did it.”

There are other people standing behind him, indistinct shapes of varying height; two males and a female, he thinks, but he doesn’t have time to sort it out because he’s assessing where he is, who he is, why he’s--

“You don’t remember anything, do you?” the man asks, still gentle.

He pauses, considering, and then shakes his head.

“I know this is confusing for you right now,” the man says, his voice deep and somehow soothing. “But there’s something you need to see.”

He considers a moment longer, torn by something he doesn’t fully understand, and then he nods.

*

He doesn’t know who he is, or why he’s here, despite everything the people around him have said. It doesn’t make any sense, but he lets them lead him along, hope tied to some strange feeling he can’t define.

The bar is a wide single room, smoke drifting above the mellow, polished wood floor. There are booths to one side, patrons cut from warm light and deep shadow as they speak. Tables stretch to fill the rest of the space along a railing that divides the room into two uneven sections. Couples dance on the other side, swaying silhouettes against the pale blue neon of the jukebox. Stretching away in a solid line to the right is a bar, slightly better lit than the rest of the place.

His companions nudge him in the direction of it, and he hesitates, not understanding--

The bartender looks to be easily in his fifties, but his hair is a dark brown untouched by gray, short length curling at his temples. His eyes are even darker than his hair, filled with more age and kindness than any person alive should be able to carry. 

As he steps forward, guided by that unknown feeling, the man’s dark eyes widen, smoke curling from a cigar as it falls from his fingers.

The voice is thick, choked with emotion and years of smoke. “My God.”

Tears prick behind his eyes, sudden memory filling him, and then the dark-haired man’s arms are around him, hugging him so tight he can scarcely breathe.

“My God, it’s really you.”

“Al,” he whispers, arms encircling the other man.

And it’s then that he understands. He’s come home.

Doctor Sam Beckett has finally come home.

  
  



End file.
